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Editing Alice Munro

Editing Alice Munro’s stories is sometimes a lesson in feeling extraneous. As I’m preparing to tell her that the final paragraph isn’t landing right, she is already faxing a new ending; as I mark up page 5, to show that something hasn’t been properly set up, she is calling to say that she has put a new page 5 in the mail. Sometimes I see a paragraph on page 10 that seems an unnecessary diversion and cross it out; when I get to page 32, I understand why it was absolutely crucial to the story and have to retrace my steps. As we go through the proofs by phone, Alice throws each discussed page on the floor. Going back to an earlier scene requires scavenging. “I’ll just put the phone down for a bit,” she says. But the process is one of excitement and deep investment in the story at hand. Whenever she disagrees with a suggested edit, I virtually always see, afterward, that it was the correct thing to do. (I am using the present tense here, although Alice has officially retired from writing, because one can always hope. She tried to stop once before and somehow found herself having written another collection.)

Alice rarely articulates a specific literary or philosophical purpose for any story; she speaks more often about characters’ motivations than about any kind of narrative design. (Of a recent story, for instance, she said, “In ‘Leaving Maverley,’ a fair number of people are after love or sex or something. The invalid and her husband seem to me to get it, while, all around, various people miss the boat for various reasons.”) Her stories, of course, present specific landscapes—generally the places that she has lived, in rural Ontario or urban British Columbia—and specific time periods, usually within her own life span. They pick up on details from her own life, though the elements of autobiography are usually more emotional than precise, with the exception of a few stories that are quite directly memoiristic portraits of her parents. There are recurring motifs: the cultural and social austerity of the provincial Canada of her youth, young motherhood, love, adultery, betrayal, premature death, the loss of a child, aging. But her stories are not blatantly thematic. One has the sense that she feels her way through her narratives, rather than thinking them through, that any plan she has is an intuitive or instinctive one, one that responds to her characters as they respond to whatever she throws at them. At the same time, there is calculation in her work: information and emotion are carefully masked or withheld; there are the plot twists that are impossible to foresee and yet land with absolute inevitability.

Alice is one of very few great writers who have shown a lifelong loyalty to the short-story form. But what one remembers most clearly from her work is not complete stories but moments, those finite, fleeting moments on which whole narratives hinge. That passage in “Dimension,” not when the father kills his children but when he writes to their mother afterward, from prison:

I will just say then: I have seen the children. I have seen them and talked to them. There. What are you thinking at the moment? You are thinking well, now he is really round the bend. Or, it’s a dream and he can’t distinguish a dream, he doesn’t know the difference between a dream and awake. But I want to tell you I do know the difference and what I know is, they exist. I say they exist, not they are alive, because alive means in our particular Dimension, and I am not saying that is where they are. In fact I think they are not. But they do exist and it must be that there is another Dimension or maybe innumerable Dimensions, but what I know is that I have got access to whatever one they are in. Possibly I got hold of this from being so much on my own and having to think and think and with such as I have to think about. So after such suffering and solitude there is a Grace that has seen the way to giving me this reward. Me the very one that deserves it the least to the world’s way of thinking.

Or the moment in “Gravel,” when a young girl’s sister throws their dog into a lake, rushes in to “save” her, and drowns:

In my mind I can see her picking up Blitzee and tossing her, though Blitzee was trying to hang on to her coat. Then backing up, Caro backing up to take a run at the water. Running, jumping, all of a sudden hurling herself at the water. But I can’t recall the sound of the splashes as they, one after the other, hit the water. Not a little splash or a big one. Perhaps I had turned toward the trailer by then—I must have done so.

When I dream of this, I am always running. And in my dreams I am running not toward the trailer but back toward the gravel pit. I can see Blitzee floundering around and Caro swimming toward her, swimming strongly, on the way to rescue her. I see her light-brown checked coat and her plaid scarf and her proud successful face and reddish hair darkened at the end of its curls by the water. All I have to do is watch and be happy—nothing required of me, after all.

These moments come not at the end of her stories, usually, nor in the climactic middle. They come two-thirds of the way through, or three-quarters. We have had enough of a story to settle into; events have taken place; relationships have been developed or shattered; people have died, or simply grown up; and then there is one step more, that Munrovian step, that takes the story suddenly to a new place. Then, instead of leaving us there, reeling, astounded by the shift—as a lesser writer might—Alice gently carries us forward, through the revelation, through the surprise or shock of it, to some kind of understanding, some acceptance, whether rueful or joyful. Nothing is neatly wrapped up, but we are shown a path through the wilderness. We don’t so much read Alice’s stories as live through them: they can be exhausting and enervating; they can leave us fragile, our senses heightened; they can leave us satisfied, thrilled. The saddest part is that they leave us at all. Kudos to the Nobel Prize committee for doing its part to bring them back.

Photograph by Paul Hawthorne/AP

Deborah Treisman is The New Yorker ’s fiction editor and the host of its Fiction Podcast.